TRAPPED ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

This post builds on the foreign policy threads in the previous one.

Here’s my argument:

1. As it relates to foreign policy in general, and the Iraq war in particular, the mindset of our leadership has been dangerously backwards for a long time.

To illustrate this point, I offer a flash back…to the September 18, 2005 issue of TIME magazine—no longer topical, but still instructive. In Joe Klein’s article “Saddam's Revenge (Iraq: Are We Losing?),” I read, re-read, and re-re-read, the following astonishing passage:

The soldiers wanted to try diplomacy and began reaching out to the less extreme elements of the insurgency…The diplomats took a harder line, refusing to negotiate with the enemy.

There it was: we’d gone through the looking glass, directly into Wonderland, where rabbits wear big hats, soldiers advocate diplomacy, and diplomats lust for blood.

This was more than red states versus blue. It signaled the cold death of wisdom.

2. John McCain is ideologically tethered to the Bush (thus Republican) war machine.

McCain’s rejects dialogue with actual or potential adversaries. Like wearing white after Labor Day, it’s just not done.

If we can take McCain’s statements at face value (if he means what he says), he offers us scant hope of moderation, let alone reversal. And severely undermines his self-proclaimed status as maverick and reformer.

3. It would be dangerous for us to vote this inverted and inflexible mindset into power for four more years.

The world has changed, and as the eight thousand drums in Beijing thundered to us, the game has changed. Economically and thus politically. No longer can we fecklessly throw our weight around, and then scramble to clean up after ourselves.

McCain assures us he knows how to win the war in Iraq (and the other one, too). Even if we forgive him—the guy who always puts country first—for keeping this a secret at this critical time, his version of wisdom sounds just like the bad old Bush gang. This is the wisdom that forecloses learning anything new…and is proud of it. The wisdom that impels McCain, in his exertions to appear presidential, to claim he knows it all.

McCain echoes the statements in TIME three years ago. How scary for us if we find ourselves trapped behind the looking glass for four more years of this unabashedly un-reformed, and un-reformable, tea party of turpitude.